Movies presented in 3D are enjoying tremendous popularity. One way of achieving three-dimensional images is by way of stereography. In stereography two images are captured and presented to a user, one from a left camera and for the left eye of a viewer, and one from a right camera and for the right eye of a viewer. Stereography is one of the oldest ways of producing a 3D image for a viewer.
In creating two images instead of just one, stereography can entail significant costs in terms of processing power and time, however. In fact, with current technology and for certain particularly complicated shots, hundreds of hours may be required to render a single frame, and doubling this time for a second viewpoint or camera is prohibitive.
Accordingly, re-projection techniques have been developed to reuse pixel color values, rendered eye, for the other eye, by mapping the same to an appropriate point for the second view as determined by the scene geometry including the desired intraocular distance, and thus creating a 3D image. In one such technique, from a depth map a mesh is created and the mesh is rendered in a rendering package. The depth map is polygonalized from the point of view of the camera that rendered the depth map, and UV coordinates are assigned to the mesh. The mesh is then textured, and subsequently the mesh can then be rendered from any other point of view or viewing angle, e.g., from a right eye for a stereographic image.
However, such current re-projection techniques are slow and can lead to undesirable results.
In addition, to address artifacts, current re-projection techniques rely on stretching or compression of pixels, i.e., filling in stretched areas with pixels of the same color as neighboring pixels, or removing pixels in the case of compression, and such can lead to undesirable artifacts or even holes remaining on a re-projected image. Accordingly, a need exists for improved methods of such re-projection.
In a related aspect, for situations where dimensionalization is desired for images or movies shot originally without benefit of stereoscopy, a need exists for a convenient way to create a corresponding image for a second eye, to result in a stereo pair for 3D viewing.